computer science

On May 11, 1997, Deep Blue, a chess-playing supercomputer, defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the last game of the rematch, and becme the first computer to beat a world-champion chess player in a classic match format. From The Turk to Computer Chess Programs The story of the chess playing supercomputer started in 1985 with a computer called ChipTest at Carnegie Mellon University by Feng-hsiung Hsu. But actually, the dream of an automated chess…

On March 22, 1946, American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher Rudolph von Bitter Rucker, better known as Rudy Rucker, was born. He is also one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. “The space of our universe is the hypersurface of a vast expanding hypersphere.” – Rudy Rucker, The Sex Sphere (1983) Youth and Education Rucker was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, where his father Embry Cobb Rucker,…

On March 11, 1915, American psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider, known simply as J.C.R. or “Lick“, was born. He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style interactive computing and was one of the most distinguished Internet pioneers. “[…] we are entering a technological age in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information – not merely in the passive way that…

On January 19, 1983, the Apple Lisa was introduced, the first personal computer to offer a graphical user interface in an inexpensive machine aimed at individual business users. Although a commercial failure, the Lisa paved the way for the famous Apple MacIntosh released in 1984 [4]. I don’t know if you are old enough to remember the early 1980s. But the era of personal computers had just began, which means there were small…

On November 17, 1962, U.S. American computer pioneer Douglas C. Engelbart has been granted a patent on the world’s first computer mouse. Using the computer mouse has become as normal as eating with knife and fork these days. But this has not always been the case, since the first computers had no graphical interface and every command had to be typed in via a traditional keyboard, which made the use of computers quite sometimes rather complicated. It…

On November 13, 1990, one day after Tim Berners-Lee‘s and Robert Cailliau‘s publication of the concept of a world wide hypertext system [2], the first web page was created.[1] Today, everyday life without the World Wide Web, or simply the Web, has become next to impossible. Our daily live depends on news being spread over the web and ecommerce has become a convenient commodity. Nobody wants to live without it. Incredible, but only 25…

On November 2, 1988, Cornell student Robert T. Morris launched the very first computer worm on the internet – and subsequently becoming the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Today his programme is referred to as “Morris Worm” and he is a tenured professor in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There may be a virus loose on the internet.”…

On October 28, 1955 entrepreneur William Henry “Bill” Gates III, or simply Bill Gates, was born in Seattle, Washington. He has left his footstep in history with creating the incredibly successful operating system Microsoft Windows or his office application programs MS Word, MS Powerpoint, or MS Excel. Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other. – Bill Gates…

On October 18, 1871, Charles Babbage, mathematician, inventor and early computer scientist passed away. We think, everybody should know about Charles Babbage and his seminal work on the first mechanical universal computer, the Analytical Engine. Although the Analytical Engine never was build during his lifetime, due to the lack of according fine mechanics in the 19th century, Babbage sketched out everything necessary to construct and to program a universal computer. “The whole…

On October 12, 2011, computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, who designed the UNIX operating system as well as the C programming language, passed away. Thanks to his contributions, computing made a huge leap forward and enabled real-time processing and multi-threading. Dennis Ritchie was born on September 9, 1941, in Bronxville, New York as son of Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist working on switching circuit theory. Dennis Ritchie graduated from Harvard…